Tao Te Ching when I don't feel like reading long-winded prose and because it never made any sense to me.

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez. Second time reading this and can more readily identify with the main protagonist Aureliano Buendia. Interesting how my current life situation influences what speaks to me from the book in a way that was different from the first time.

Overview

The central argument of Republic, Lost is that members of theUS Congress are dependent upon funding from large donors. Lessig sees the system as "legal but corrupt", and that the pivotal point of the corruption is campaign finance.[1] In Lessig's view, it is a systemic problem.[3] He noted that congresspersons spend three of every five weekdays raising money for reelection.[3] It leads to inertia: left-leaning Occupy Wall Street activists see little progress on legislation dealing with global warming, while right-leaning Tea Party activists see little progress on simplifying the tax code.[4] According to Lessig, congresspersons being dependent on large donors affects the ability of Congress to govern, whether or not donations actually change the way members of Congress vote on measures. A poll conducted for the book showed that the American public is cynical about American politics: that 71% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats believed that "money buys results in Congress".[5] Lessig also points out Congress's low approval rating—11% as of the writing of the book (9% as of October 2011).[6] He suggested that the system encouraged congresspersons to take up less-than-important issues for the purpose of intimidating corporations to encourage them to become campaign contributors:

Our current tax system with all its complexities is in part designed to make it easier for candidates, in particular congressmen, to raise money to get back to congress ... All sorts of special exceptions which expire after a limited period of time are just a reason to pick up the phone and call somebody and say 'Your exception is about to expire, here’s a good reason for you to help us fight to get it to extend.' And that gives them the opportunity to practice what is really a type of extortion – shaking the trees of money in the private sector into their campaign coffers so that they can run for congress again.

‘Fear Itself: The New Deal

and the Origins of Our Time’

by Ira Katznelson

Roosevelt restored America’s spirits, saved liberal democracy and led the Allies to victory over Hitler and the Japanese, but he never dispelled the fear. Sometimes he aggravated it — for example, by interning Japanese Americans as if they deserved to be feared. And under Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War sharply raised the level of national anxiety. It was an age of fear.

The role of Southern white members of Congress in the New Deal and Fair Deal eras is not a new subject for Katznelson, but he dissects it here compellingly, reminding us painfully how crudely racist American society was just one human lifetime ago. FDR was caught in “a Southern cage,” he writes, and he provides lively descriptions of its occupants and their hair-raising prejudices. Perhaps the most vivid character sketch is ofSen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a Neanderthal whose name was easy to laugh at but whose rhetoric was anything but laughable in its use of racial epithets for African Americans and its disparagement of Catholics and Jews.

(Liveright) - ’Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time’ by Ira Katznelson

Yet Bilbo, a staunch New Dealer, and his fellow Mississippians in Congress were crucial allies of FDR’s. So when Northern Democrats tried to pass anti-lynching legislation in 1934, FDR refused to help. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill,” the president told Walter White of the NAACP, Southern members “will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

Again and again the Southerners provided crucial votes, not just for New Deal legislation in the early 1930s, but also on measures to prepare for World War II. In August 1941, for example, Roosevelt won a House vote to strengthen the military draft in obvious preparation for war by a single vote, 203 to 202. Southern members voted 123 to 8 in favor. The pattern recurred after the war, when Southern members gave strong support to Truman’s forceful Cold War policies.

Just finished reading the Dune series by Frank Herbert, currently reading fan-fiction's Dune 7: Advent and Dune Revenant (don't think I'll ever bring my self to read the books by Brian and the other guy).